Marie-Godfrida Cecilia Bombeek, alias Sister Godfrida, went down in criminal history as a drug-addicted, lesbian serial killer who murdered at least three people between 1976 and 1977. She was born in 1933 in the Belgian village of Overmere. At the age of 15, Marie-Godfrida decided to join the Apostolic Congregation of St. Joseph, not far from the small town of Wetteren, to become a nun. From then on, Marie-Godfrida, now known as Sister Godfrida, lived in the convent and worked in the municipal retirement home. Godfrida was considered a diligent and self-sacrificing nun who worked hard and was therefore quickly appointed mother superior. In the mid-1970s, she also became head of geriatrics at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Wetteren. Everything was going normally until Sister Godfrida underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor and was completely changed. After the operation, she had been given morphine for the pain, to which she became addicted. Her personality had completely changed. The once conscientious mother superior drank copious amounts of alcohol and had sexual relationships with a retired priest and a nun with whom she dined in expensive restaurants. For some time, the other sisters who also worked in Sister Godfrida’s 38-bed ward had noticed that when she was on duty, an above-average number of patients died. They believed that Sister Godfrida, who openly used cocaine and morphine, was responsible. This was because jewelry and money had usually been stolen from the deceased patients. Sister Godfrida used this money to buy her illegal drugs. Sister Pieta, Sister Franziska, and Sister Godive expressed these suspicions to the police at the Wetteren police station on January 16, 1978. They also testified that they had documented cases of abusive physical punishment of their sisters in the convent of the Apostolic Congregation and in St. Joseph’s Hospital against elderly patients, which Sister Godfrida had committed. Sister Godfrida was subsequently arrested. During police questioning, she confessed to murdering 87-year-old Maria van der Gunst, 82-year-old Pieter Diggmann, and 78-year-old Leon Maihofer with an overdose of insulin. Sister Godfrida, who was deemed mentally incompetent and admitted to a psychiatric institution, is believed to have killed up to 30 patients between 1976 and 1978. Until her death in 2019, Sister Godfrida lived in complete anonymity, passing away at the age of 86 at the St. Joseph nursing home in Wetteren. The sister also became famous through the film “Killer Nun” by Italian director Giulio Berruti, in which Anita Ekberg played the leading role and which is based on the story of Sister Godfrida.
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Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
